The content optimization platform Parse.ly has just released its first Authority Report, which was based off their extensive study of the aggregated traffic to its hundreds of clients. The study, one of the largest of its kind, was conducted using traffic in July of 2013, and measured over five billion page views from over 160 million unique visitors. The main focus of the study was to see where traffic was coming from for their clients.
While it would certainly be no surprise that Google contributes a huge amount of traffic to virtually every type of page, their influence is significantly higher for some types of sites, including major news pages. Companies like Reuters, Dallas Morning News, Mashable and others which use the Parse.ly found that Google properties (including search, YouTube, gMail and others) sent well over 200 million page views, compared with the next largest source of traffic, Facebook, which sent under 75 million.
Bing & Yahoo, the so-called competition in the search market, drove only 13 million and 40 million page views respectively. This is significantly lower than the 20+ percent of traffic which would be expected if the sources were evenly distributed based on search engine popularity.
Since this is the first report of its kind, it is unclear whether this is an area where Google is expanding their dominance, or if they have just always been particularly popular when it comes to news related searches. Popular services like Google News also undoubtedly gave them a significant bump, given the fact that people using the news service will undoubtedly click through to see source articles on the major news sites.
Parse.ly will be releasing this report on a monthly basis, which will provide another excellent source of information for marketers who want to closely follow traffic patterns. This type of information is extremely important, especially for those working in news related companies.
You can sign up to get this month’s authority report, and have future reports delivered to you by clicking HERE.
